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Denmark has opened a village equipped with a music library, restaurants and shops reserved for dementia sufferers.

Svendborg Demensby on the island of Funen is the first of its kind in Denmark and is modelled on similar villages in Italy, Canada and the Netherlands.

The village of 125 homes was developed on the site of an old brewery which had already been used as a care centre for the elderly. The idea is to give residents the feel of living in a small town and is expected to give dementia sufferers a safer environment and a more fulfilling life in comparison with ordinary sheltered housing. It’s a pilot scheme with plans to open similar projects in Aalborg, Odense and Herning.

The Danish Alzheimer’s Association cautiously welcomed the initiative but voiced worries about the villagers being cut off from the outside world. “It concerns us when special dementia villages are being built where dementia sufferers are excluded from the rest of society,” Nis Peter Nissen, the head of the association, told Danish Radio.

In November, Denmark put forward a national plan aimed at making the country completely “dementia-friendly” by 2025. This has become a political priority for Denmark, where the number of dementia-sufferers is expected to rise to a staggering 150,000 in a nation of 5.6 million by 2040, according to the Danish National Scientific Center for Dementia.

The plan involves three objectives: give dementia sufferers a safe and dignified life, focus on tailor-made care and prevention systems and finally support friends and relatives of dementia sufferers. Last year Danish municipalities started to fit dementia patients with GPS tracking systems. Whereas the initiative gathered mixed reactions from the Danish public, it was warmly received by sheltered housing personnel who dubbed the tracking system “Big Mother.”

The first such project was at Hogewey near Amsterdam in the Netherlands. There they have homes designed to look like the 1950s, 1970s and the 2000s to offer a familiar look which reassures the residents. I seem to remember that they also had different styles to reflect different social classes. A kind of extended reminiscence therapy.

Unlike typical villages, however, this one has cameras monitoring its 150 residents every hour of every day, caretakers posing in street clothes, and only one door in and out of town, all part of a security system designed to keep the community safe. Friends and family are encouraged to visit and some do every day.

Residents are cared for by 250 full- and part-time geriatric nurses and specialists, who wander the town and hold a range of occupations in the village, like cashiers, grocery-store attendees, and post-office clerks. There is no money exchange needed as those costs are included in the state-subsidised fees.

Studies have suggested that its inhabitants need less medication and live longer than those in standard care homes.

Older people’s risk of getting dementia has fallen by a quarter in just over a decade according to a new US study. Higher levels of education since the second world war seem to be offsetting the risks of obesity and high blood pressure. Although older people are fatter than they used to be it is seen as less of a dementia risk in old age than in middle age.

Another study, in the UK, found that men’s chances of getting dementia at specific ages had dropped by 40% in 20 years as they adopted healthier life styles. Women’s risk levels dropped less. However conditions like obesity and diabetes continue to rise as people live longer.

There’s also the MEND project which claims to get good results in the early stages which I posted about here.

As the population ages it means that more overall are getting dementia and numbers in Britain are expected to tis from 850,000 at present to over a million within 10 years. It has already overtaken heart disease as the leading cause of death in England & Wales.

Overall however it may be that the prevalence of dementia is at least stabilising if not declining in parts of Europe and the USA.